The Attorney General shall take all appropriate action to seek the overruling of Supreme Court precedents that limit the authority of State and Federal governments to impose capital punishment.
Our justice system is greatly diminished when an individual is convicted without a fair trial, but today we can celebrate that a great injustice has been swept away… I am pleased the high court has validated my grave concerns with how this prosecution was handled, and I am thankful we now have a fresh opportunity to see that justice is done.
We have three interested parties [in capital cases]. We have ‘We the People’; we have the accused; and we have the victim’s family. If we don’t get it right, we’re 0 for 3… Let’s make sure all three entities are sure that we’re doing it right.
[W]hat this represents is forced asphyxiation, gassing a subject to death, exposing him to a lack of oxygen such that both extreme discomfort, distress, pain, and terror would be felt all the way up to the point of losing consciousness.
I am convinced that the death penalty is deeply flawed, I am committed to working towards ending it wherever it is still practiced, and I believe conversations within the Christian faith practice will be critical in making progress towards that end.
To use a method [nitrogen suffocation] that was a form of state-sanctioned murder and genocide of literally millions of people…to re-implement that as a form of justice in 21st-century Louisiana seems to us equally abhorrent, because of the way that method of execution is so horribly and intrinsically linked to the decimation of our people.
While people may disagree on whether or not the death penalty is an appropriate punishment, there should be no dispute that the process, especially when carrying out an execution, should be met with solemnity and dignity, and not whimsically moved around to accommodate political schedules and photo ops… The death penalty should never be wielded as a political weapon.
Having represented Mr. Hutchinson for a decade and based upon the recent reports finding him to be incompetent to be executed, it is appropriate to request a stay of execution on his behalf…Executing an incompetent and severely mentally wounded combat veteran violates the U.S. Constitution.
A massive botch is exactly what happened… Mr. Mahdi elected the firing squad, and this court sanctioned it, based on the assumption that SCDC could be entrusted to carry out its straightforward steps: locating the heart; placing a target over it; and hitting that target. That confidence was clearly misplaced.
[A]s crime survivors, we know firsthand what families need to heal, and the form of punishment imposed on the person who caused the harm is often not the primary concern.
We’ve got to address the broad issue of, what are other methods, the discussion of capital punishment in general, and then something that costs, I think, $300,000 a pop that has a 90-day shelf life — I’m not going to be for putting it on the shelf and then letting them expire…
Whether one supports or opposes capital punishment, the financial reality involves choosing between funding executions or investing those same public resources in targeted crime prevention and deterrence programs.
I feel horrible for the victims…But what it boils down to is, no matter how you look at it, whether it’s a firing squad, whether you’re going to hang the person, whether you’re doing to electrocute the person, whether you’re going to use lethal injection, it all takes another human being to carry out that execution.
The Constitution guarantees that every person accused of a crime has the right to be tried by a jury of their peers, but that promise is by definition denied for people facing the death penalty… Death qualification systematically excludes prospective jurors based on their race, sex, and religion, violating their own rights to civic participation. The resulting juries do not reflect our communities, convict more frequently, and are composed to ignore evidence favoring a life sentence in violation of our Constitution. Justice depends on equal access to the jury box. We must demand and end to this cycle of discrimination and exclusion once and for all.
As an executive and investor, I find it unthinkable that we continue to pour public resources into such a fundamentally broken system. If any company or product I evaluated had an error rate comparable to the death penalty — where for every eight people executed, one person has been exonerated — I would never invest.
In Florida, under Governor DeSantis’ administration, they show that a defendant who kills a white victim is over fifteen times more likely to be executed than a defendant whose victims are not white. And, because Governor DeSantis has not executed a single white defendant for killing a non-white defendant, the statistical disparity is incalculable. That incalculability, in and of itself, is an answer.
Given the recent spate of executions, it may surprise you to learn that the increase is a false indicator of the state of the death penalty in America. Most of those executions took place many years, in some cases decades, after the individual had been convicted. These executions actually represent the past more than the present as a remnant of our nation’s former affinity for capital punishment.
Our Savior said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ That man. That young man. I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did in his. What Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love and always love… I do not want that man’s blood on my ledger.
There is no doubt that prosecutors have broad discretion to make charging decisions in all cases, including death penalty cases. However, in the area of capital cases, if the government wields its admittedly broad discretion in an arbitrary way to decide who lives and who dies, it violates the Fifth and Eighth Amendments.
Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life.
Boyd asks for the barest form of mercy: to die by firing squad, which would kill him in seconds, rather than by torturous suffocation lasting up to four minutes. The Constitution would grant him that grace. My colleagues do not. The Court thus turns its back on Boyd and on the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment.
DPI’s recent report Forgotten Service, Lasting Wounds is] a floodlight because it really shows how huge the problem is… how much the military experience affects the individual veterans… that because of what this veteran went through; that is why this veteran is in this situation. They don’t come back the same.
